Utility Planet is the official blog for the column of the same name in The Spectrum Monitor. It replaces Utility World in the discontinued Monitoring Times magazine. Utilities are all VLF/LF/MF/HF (and sometimes low-band VHF) radio communications except broadcasting, CB, and non-emergency amateur. If you understood the last sentence, you know enough to read this blog.

Friday, April 08, 2016

Germany reverses digital AM ban (VOA Radiogram for April 9-10)

Desk, get me rewrite. Stop the presses. Kill the front page.(This will be the second revision of the May column. Poor Ken.)

The German government now says it was all a misunderstanding.

From Kim Andrew Elliott:

Hello friends,

The German communications regulator
Bundesnetzagentur has changed its mind about allowing digital modes on
shortwave broadcast transmitters in Germany. Apparently BNetzA thought
that Channel 292 was transmitting the text and images in
single sideband (SSB), which is how amateurs, military, etc, transmit
the digital modes. Now that they know that the MFSK32 and other modes
are sent as program audio on an analogue amplitude-modulation shortwave
transmitter, their objections were withdrawn.
(It's similar to A2A modulated CW.)

BNetzA prefers that the term MFSK32 not be used
to describe these broadcasts, but we have to specify the mode so that
you can set Fldigi or other decoding software to the correct mode. In
any case, the weekly MFSK32 transmission will
resume on The Mighty KBC, and DigiDX will return to Channel 292.

Meanwhile, VOA Radiogram this weekend will be all
MFSK32 except for the transmission schedule in Olivia 64-2000 under the
closing music.

Here is the lineup for VOA Radiogram, program 158, 9-10 April 2016, all in MFSK32 except where noted:

The Mighty KBC will (after a one-week
break) transmit a minute of MFSK32 Sunday at about 0220 UTC (Saturday
10:20 pm EDT) on 6040 kHz, via Germany. Sometimes the MFSK32 is as late
as 0228 UTC. Reports for this KBC reception to
Eric:
themightykbc@gmail.com